yeah, me too. it was very funny when my ex-schoolmates made a list to share with names and payments for a party, they hardly agreed about the MSOffice version to use :).

it is pretty strange that so many "serious" companies are fooled by the MS (and alike) products and this makes me think the "seriousness" is only a matter of image, self-confidence and the only warranty is the damage compensation. most of the times the compensation isn't worth the effort, anyway.

I thought the vote of this would be unanimous,but seemingly there are those who prefer another office packet than openoffice...
Openoffice does it for me. I use it side by side on my MS Office distro.

Same here.

We are mostly MACs here, so the price of Office for MAC is about $300 a pop!

So when OpenOffice came out for MAC we jumped right in :D

We use OO.O side by side with MS Office, with no big issues....

-C

OOO fits all my needs. The only drawbacks (for me) are some .doc import issues and on running macros (spreadsheet) it is incredibly slow.

Only Open Office.

As for the discussions around OOo, Sun and Go-oo, there is a recent interesting article from Heise-Online, Healthcheck:OpenOffice - it addresses some of the debatable aspects mentioned here.

Also OpenOffice has useful server mode. Was very useful when I needed to generate spreadsheets with protected cells and multiple sheets on a webserver.

I'm voting oo3 at least maybe until koffice catches up.

i will stick with OpenOffice.org

I might be a minority here but for me GNOME office programs worked better than OpenOffice. The former seems to be less memory hungry than the latter. OpenOffice just drains memory out of your system. Also, the spreadsheet thing in OpenOffice can't handle properly external data files, which GNOME office does.

OpenOffice ...


N.B: I must also add - when you compare it to MS Office 2007 - OpenOffice is an amateurish tool!!!
:(

Well---allow me to offer a different perspective: Because of my dependence on a salary, I am in a Windows shop. Having become quite proficient in Winodws 2003 AND Open Office, I was doing just fine. Then they droped Office 2007 on us.

Office 2007 is a travesty...I do not appreciate having to completely re-learn the UI when I have work to get done. Some things appear to be broken, but that may be simply because MS did something really clever to make it "better".

With the resources wasted in converting everyone to Office 2007, I could have switched the whole enterprise to OpenOffice---which does 98% of what the majority need to do.

So, with all due respect, your statement is --IMHO-- dead wrong.

You hit the microsoft profit motive on the head. I used to teach an A+ course at a community college, and there would be a lot of "refresher" courses in various office products going on in other rooms.

Most of the people were what you'd call secretaries, all were heavy end users of office products for their livelihoods.

I conducted polls, and to a one the vast majority had preferred word perfect to office, but Microsoft had threatened to pull support to this community college if they kept teaching word perfect.

Strike one.

Then they all complained that they were here in this "refresher" training not because they didn't know how to use excel or what have you, but because MS simply changed the name/location of every function. They were spending time and $$$ learning what MS had done to office, not how to be productive.

Strike two.

Vista and 7 are going to be the same. Fortunately a lot of people are on to this now and with Linux hitting the stride on the desktop, I am seeing the slow beginnings of a shift. I have a number of users who've made the switch 100%, and many more who have at least one Linux presence they use.

I grant MS office ultimately performs the best, but what would you expect with all the $$$$$$ they've thrown at it.

In comparison, open office is a miracle, as good as it is. Mind you the nature of open source development...